Rough landing for Air Canada flight at Pearson airport
Posted Feb 26, 2017 09:49:18 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Transportation Safety Board (TSB) is investigating an incident involving an Air Canada flight early Saturday morning.
Preliminary information indicates Flight 623 out of Halifax left the runway for a short distance while attempting to land during a storm at Pearson Airport around midnight.
“During the landing sequence, the aircraft travelled through the grass on the western side of the runway, eventually coming to a stop on the runway centre line,” the TSB’s Ewan Tasker said at a news conference.
He said there were no injuries reported and damage to the aircraft appeared to be minor. Five runway edge lights were also damaged.
“The impact was rough,” said one passenger. “I think we hit the grass before the runway. We saw the wheels are bent, mud is all over the windows. …We were really lucky.”
Another passenger said it was a tense and nervous few minutes.
“It was very, very fast. There was a lot of noise, a lot of bumping and we hit very, very hard, very rapidly.”
Paul Varian of Burlington, Ont., says the plane lurched left off the runway and came to a “very sudden stop.”
Varian says passengers were thrown forward in their seats and a few oxygen masks dropped. He noticed brown and black debris on his window, which he says may have come from a blown-out tire beneath him.
“We could see that clearly there was a lot of mud on the underbelly and the left-hand side of the plane,” he says. “The tires were completely blown out on the left-hand wheel … but the plane didn’t appear significantly damaged beyond that.”
Varian says emergency responders were on the scene within minutes and it took about an hour and a half for passengers to be shuttled to a nearby terminal.
A safety board spokeswoman said Flight 623 was carrying 118 people.
Julie Leroux added investigators will examine the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder — also known as a black box — as well as weather conditions, and conduct interviews with passengers and Air Canada to determine the sequence of events that led to the incident.
